the categories of consumer society – and, more recently, personal greed – have expanded. Compared with the idea of innovation, these categories tower over the brains of bureaucrats, and over the thought of society as a whole. Few, for example, see failure to innovate outside the arena of finance as in any way a cause of today’s economic downturn, even if they will ruefully concede that, too often, innovation itself can be a casualty of such a downturn. Instead, political economy has been reduced to consumer habits of buying and use, to consumer behaviour, its psychology and its economics, to consumer depletion of the planet and its resources, to population and its control. And that is why the scope for scientific and technological innovation is now unconsciously taken as very, very narrow